The Best American Sports Writing 2013

by Glenn Stout

  “And trust me: we don’t quit without a fight,” says Lucas. “I drove this woman crazy with my addict bullshit, stunts she doesn’t even know about till this day.”

  “Like what?” says Smith, a pale, pretty blonde, checking a BlackBerry that never stops buzzing.

  “Like copping a gang of Percs at the Super Bowl and gulping ’em before the plane ride down to rehab.”

  Smith closes her eyes, letting this information settle. In February 2011, she’d flown him to Dallas to come clean before the national football media, telling hundreds of reporters during Super Bowl week about the pain-pill epidemic beneath their noses. Lucas did face the writers (who largely ignored him), then hit the streets of iced-in Dallas for one last brain-freeze binge. “That’s just friggin’ wrong, Ray. If you’d gotten arrested trying to score, or . . . or something worse had happened—”

  “I know,” says Lucas, “but there it is. An addict’s gonna do what he’s gonna do.”

  When it comes to pro football, the news is no longer new: we all know the wages of this sport. Brain death. Bountygate. Concussions. Crippled ex-players living in penury, unable to support themselves and their children. “This is a game with a 100 percent injury rate, according to the league’s own stats,” says DeMaurice Smith, the executive director of the NFL Players Association. “The average career for players is three and a half years, then the league fights in court to deny them lifetime insurance for the injuries that forced them out. That’s the state of play: they’re fungible assets.”

  But for decades, the sport’s most transparent scandal has gone untold, if not unseen. Since the advent, in the 1980s, of modern narcotics like Vicodin and Percocet, and then later OxyContin, team doctors and trainers have dispensed pills in the millions to keep hurt players practicing and playing. That fact has long been an open secret among writers who cover the game, an unspoken pact between league and press to protect what’s left of the sport’s mythos. In the wake, however, of the concussion pandemic and the cluster of ex-player suicides, the football media has begun to stir. Articles have appeared in regional papers (the New York Daily News, the Minneapolis Star Tribune) that delve, for the first time, into opioid abuse, though only on the part of the players, not the teams that fed them the drugs. Last year, ESPN filed a report on the plight of ex-players with toxic narcotics habits, releasing the results of a survey of pain-pill abuse it had commissioned with a team of researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The survey found that more than half the league’s veterans had taken narcotics during their playing days; that almost three-quarters of that cohort had misused the drugs, taking them longer, and in greater amounts, than suggested; that the majority (63 percent) received their drugs from a nonmedical source like a trainer instead of the team doctor; and that a third were using them habitually in retirement. Given the population of 18,000 current NFL retirees, that means at least 5,000 are taking narcotics, and at least 2,000 suffer from pain-pill dependence that compounds their chronic conditions. “They addict these guys to drugs to keep a product on the field, then cut them when they’re too hurt to play,” says Mel Owens, a former outside linebacker with the Los Angeles Rams who’s now a disability lawyer in Southern California with hundreds of ex-players as clients. “The guys file for workmen’s comp, and the teams say, ‘Why should we pay you? You’re nothing but low-life addicts!’ It’s the next big front in our battle with the league: a class-action suit for drug malpractice.”

  When you talk to retired players, the thing you’re always struck by isn’t their size or what’s left of their physical pride. Instead, it’s the love they still bear for the game that took years, or decades, off their lives. They reverence the coach who made them play hurt, give thanks to the trainer who shot them up at halftime, and praise the opponent who hit them head-high for the top plays on SportsCenter.

  But even for a true believer like Lucas, who entered the league in 1996 as a special-teams gunner and backup QB, loyalty has its limits. “If I ever see Dave Wannstedt on the street, there’s gonna be a bad misunderstanding,” he snarls as we drive to an appointment with Dr. Arash Emami, the PAST surgeon who will repair his neck. Wannstedt was his coach with the Miami Dolphins in 2002 when Lucas was hurt running a double-reverse just before the half against the Buffalo Bills. “I got blindsided on the toss and driven into the turf; my [throwing] shoulder popped out and was hanging down.” Taken off the field for X-rays, Lucas put the shoulder back in himself, and, he says, the team doctor barred him from returning to the game. “For once, a doctor did what he’s supposed to,” says Lucas. But, he claims, the doctor then left and Wannstedt and the trainer came in and said, “‘We need you—[backup QB Sage] Rosenfels isn’t ready.’ So the trainer shoots me up with lidocaine or something and gives me a bunch of pain pills and I go back out there. But I couldn’t feel my arm and threw four picks because I wasn’t man enough to say no.” (Both Wannstedt, who is now the defensive coordinator for the Bills, and the trainer deny that Lucas was given any medication during this game, and say they have never pressured a player back into a game against doctor’s orders.)

  It wasn’t the worst injury Lucas had weathered in eight hard years spent mostly on the margins of four teams—just the hit that pushed him out the door. Lucas played the next month in electric pain, then was waived by Wannstedt at season’s end. He carried a clipboard for the Ravens the following year, but his spine was so ravaged that when he sneezed during practice, he couldn’t move his legs for several hours. Again, though: no grudges, Wannstedt excepted. “Bill Parcells, the greatest man next to my dad, told me Rule One my rookie year. He said, ‘If you want to stay here, shut your mouth and open your eyes: watch what the vets do and follow suit.’” What he saw that first summer was a roomful of grinders palming fistfuls of pills from the trainer and forming long lines for Toradol shots just to make it to practice. Toradol, an anti-inflammatory with stiff side effects if abused—kidney damage, ulcers, bleeding in the brain—should never be given more than several days running, except for post-op pain. Lucas took Toradol for months at a time and was scarcely alone in that. “Toradol was my friend: I’d take pills to practice and big old needles on game day,” says McCrary, the Super Bowl fullback who now, at 40, lives in head-to-toe pain. “I’d get IVs of Toradol mixed with painkillers, but other guys just took shots,” says Leander Jordan, an offensive lineman with the San Diego Chargers and Jacksonville Jaguars before back woes forced him into retirement in 2006. “You’d see 10 needles laid in a row, and the trainer would go right down the line.”

  When it wasn’t Toradol, it was Indocin, another anti-inflammatory. “They’d give us those in plastic bags: anti-inflammatories in one bag, painkillers in another, and stuff to help you sleep in the third,” says Harvey Armstrong, a nose tackle who played for the Philadelphia Eagles and Indianapolis Colts and had seven knee surgeries in eight years. “And if you said you lost ’em, the trainers gave you more. Whatever you wanted, no questions asked.” None of the teams cited in this article made their trainers available to confirm or deny this.

  In his four years with the Jets, Lucas ripped a tendon in his patella, severely herniated two lumbar discs, frayed ligaments in his elbow, and tore his rotator cuff. Each of these called for reconstructive surgery that would have cost him a full year out of football. But Lucas, who earned the league minimum most seasons and always sweated the final round of cuts, couldn’t afford that luxury. He had minor procedures done by surgeons over the winters—arthroscopic stitch-ups and bone-chip removals—and bought in fully to the rehab process with yoga, Pilates, and plyometrics. That, and took Vicodin year-round to dampen the pain, and Ambien, scotch, and Xanax to get some rest. “People don’t understand: you can’t sleep when everything hurts. Legit pain needs legit medication.”

  He also leaned on his football rabbi: then–Jets trainer Dave Price. Lucas calls Price, now with the Kansas City Chiefs, the “best fucking trainer I had in eight years. The only one who really
gave a shit. I broke a bone in my leg against the Colts, for instance, and he got a room next to mine at the Marriott so he could run and change the ice every hour.” That was in 1999, Lucas’s breakthrough season, when he started nine games and won six of them, though his back was so gnarled he could barely crouch under center for the sciatica singeing both legs. “Wednesdays were bad for me, Fridays too. I’d need extra, and he saw that I got ’em. And the plane home from games—forget it, man. No one knows what happens on team planes.” (Price declined to comment on these allegations.)

  As described by Lucas, those New York–bound jets were booze cruises minus the sea: players plying themselves with top-shelf liquor and beer, with the team providing all the Vikes and Xanax they could eat. That combination of toxins can “play havoc with lung function, depressing it or stopping it altogether,” warns Dr. Amrish Patel, PAST’s director of pain management, adding that it can also cause strokes and seizures. The Jets, of course, weren’t alone in this: “Liquor and pills on planes go back decades,” says Owens, the lawyer and ex-Ram who played in the 1980s. “One of my clients says the team brought beer kegs onto flights; guys would be drunk and doped up every Sunday.”

  To be clear: no trainer can legally give narcotics or Toradol injections to players; only team doctors are licensed to do that. But physicians are generally available just three days a week: on game days, Mondays, and Tuesdays, to tend to the injured. The other four days, it falls to trainers to keep players on the field. For decades, they did so, according to these veterans, by doling meds out, by hand or in packets, from bucket-size bottles of tablets. Those bottles, containing 250 or 500 pills, were ordered from medical-supply houses using the team doctor’s DEA number. The bottles were kept in safes or in padlocked cabinets to which the doctor was supposed to have sole access. In fact, they were freely available to trainers, who dispensed from them as needed.

  NFL commissioner Roger Goodell was among those who declined to comment on this or any of the allegations in this article. Instead, the league put forth Adolpho Birch, an NFL vice president who handles substance abuse policy; Birch denies that such things happen, then or now. “Every pill is accounted for, to the dose, and noted in players’ records,” he said by phone. “We have an intricate system to regulate inventories and auditing conducted by outside experts that cross-reference against prescriptions written.” When told of players’ insistence that they got pills by hand, instead of via prescription, Birch scoffed: “This isn’t something we’ve heard anecdotally.” Furthermore, he added, the league has drug-tested players for narcotics since 1989, “and the levels don’t have to be excessive.”

  The players I spoke to burst out laughing at Birch’s comments, particularly in response to being tested. “Test for narcotics! There would be no one to play—they’d have to suit the ball boys up,” says Lucas. “Do we know that our players are seeking meds, both before and after games?” says DeMaurice Smith, the union chief. “Yes, we’ve done our own internal surveys. But when we spoke to the league about the bucket-of-pills problem, its response to us was nothing, no new proposal. In fact, when we demanded that they get informed consent before injecting guys with Toradol, they said they’d only do so if players signed a waiver holding them harmless in future lawsuits.”

  “In college, you heard about needles and pills and said, ‘Those NFL dudes are crazy. I’m not doing that to my body,’” says Lucas. “But then you get here, and it’s not even a conversation. No one talks about it, you just do it.” Like many players, he stopped pilling before games for fear that the drugs slowed response times, relying instead on the Toradol shot to block his pain for four hours. By age 31, though, the jig was up: he’d been waived by the Ravens, gone to fat on Devil Dogs, and was sleeping on a recliner in the family room because he couldn’t lie flat without screaming. He had a modest nest egg, three daughters, and four years of health care paid by the league to get his surgeries done. He also had a ravening morphine habit that he angrily denied for six years. That nest egg, and those girls, never stood a chance.

  Dr. William Focazio does nothing by half-measures. He lives in a mansion bought from Russell Simmons, summers in a compound on the Jersey Shore, and owns three outpatient surgical centers that churn from morning till night. An Italian American whose bull-chested gruffness masks an all-access heart for hard-luck stories, he thought he had a sense of what he’d let himself in for when he created PAST in 2008. “I’d seen a TV thing about NFL vets who were busted up and needed a little help,” he says, referring to an HBO Real Sports piece focusing on Brian DeMarco, the 30-something, back-broken former Jags lineman whose story was first told in these pages in September 2007. Recruiting from his circle of distinguished peers—surgeons, neurologists, presidents of medical boards—Focazio assembled a tier-one crew of volunteers to patch up vets, retool their medications, and send them back to productive midlife work.

  What showed up, however, was a series of men with what Focazio is calling Pan-Athletic Traumatic Syndrome: crippling injuries to spines and soft tissue, front-brain damage coupled with mood disorders, and—a condition new to him—“polypharmacy,” meaning mass consumption of many drugs at once, all or most of them prescribed. “Ten, 12 scrips written by different doctors, none of whom knew what they were treating,” says Focazio. “Sleep stuff, benzos, antipsychotics for mood—half this stuff was blocking other drugs. Some guys were so toxic, we couldn’t operate on them. They’d have stroked out on the table during surgery.”

  Focazio, a gastroenterologist with 30 years’ experience but not a whit of social work training, knew he was overmatched. He called Jennifer Smith, who’d run the day-to-day affairs of Gridiron Greats. But “I was burned out and told him no,” says Smith, who had spent five years helping men so damaged that she barely got home to Dallas and her aging parents. In the end, she relented, saying she’d come east for a year to scale PAST up to a full-serve clinic. That was three years and 200 veterans ago, and mission creep has long since set in. Her two phones never stop ringing, and each month brings a new crop of patients to northern New Jersey for salvage. Smith flies them in, usually six at a time, boards them at the Marriott near MetLife Stadium, and puts them through a two-day diagnostic blitz of MRIs, blood draws, and workups. Then, before their surgeries and neurology appointments, she shuttles them five miles north to Paterson, New Jersey, where Dr. Manuel Guantez, director of the Turning Point drug treatment center, pushes a group of vets to own their addictions. “What’s different about these guys from the people we usually treat is, they didn’t know they were addicts,” says Guantez. “They’ve abused pills for years, their wives and kids are gone, and they barely leave the house except to cop. But because they’ve been using for their ‘injuries,’ it just now hits them that they’re junkies.”

  At one of those group sessions, I ran into Ben Smith, a handsome ex-safety with the Eagles who couldn’t look less like a dope fiend. Clear-eyed and robust after nine months with PAST, he presents as a man who’s sailed a smooth line since his seven-year career ended in 1996. Instead, he’s emerging from a long stretch in hell and is just now tallying up his losses: a third of his life given to a narcotics addiction that pushed him to the brink of suicide, plus the $600,000 he’d set aside for retirement but had already long since burned through.

  Smith, now 45, and clean since last Christmas, was Philly’s first-round pick in 1990, a warhead of a safety with tailback speed and the smarts to start for Buddy Ryan as a rookie. One of four children bred in small-town Georgia by teetotaling Baptist parents, Smith was a rarity in that wild-child clubhouse: a quiet man of God who lived his faith. “My daddy raised us up on church-structure-church, and if we didn’t do it his way, he’d beat us blind,” says Smith. “Extension cords, fan belts, branches, what-have-you. It was abuse, but he had high expectations.”

  So did Smith, who played a Pro Bowl–worthy corner, shutting down the likes of Jerry Rice, Michael Irvin, and Art Monk. Then, on a bitter cold day in his second season, he pi
cked off Cleveland Browns quarterback Bernie Kosar and was flying to the end zone when someone clipped him sideways at the knee. The knee was destroyed, all three ligaments torn, a rare and by no means simple reconstruction. “The team doctor said it was the worst he’d seen, and that’s coming from a surgeon with 20 years.”

  The doctor operated that winter, harvesting the cruciate ligament from a cadaver to remake Smith’s anterior, posterior, and medial collateral ligaments. Well before minicamp, though, it was clear the surgery wasn’t a success. Smith’s swelling persisted, the pain was relentless, and the joint felt squishy when he tried to pivot. To expedite his progress, Smith says, team trainer Otho Davis (now deceased) fed him the diet of oral narcotics—Percocets, Lortabs, oxycodone—that was standard in that clubhouse. “Otho’d come by your locker with his bags of pills, give you a four-day supply,” says Armstrong, the nose tackle who played three years in Philly before a trade to Indianapolis in 1985. “On the bus to play the Giants, he’d have his black bag out and go down the aisle with pills.”

  After months of failed rehab, Smith went to specialists in L.A.—sure enough, his MCL hadn’t been fixed. “In hindsight, I should’ve wrapped it up right there and sued the doctor for millions,” he says. Instead, he got the knee rebuilt again and sat out the 1992 season. He came back in 1993, but even that was too soon: the knee swelled and throbbed after every practice. There was no thought of taking a second year off, though; he had children to feed and clothe. “One of my sisters had got hooked on crack and couldn’t look after her five kids. I’d bought my mom a house, but now she had to raise them, and put it on me to provide.”